About the VNS3 Edge Plugin System

The recent release of VNS3 5.0 is the culmination of years of learning from our users what a modern, reliable, and secure network requires. This newest version of VNS3 provides a customizable platform for your cloud networking needs, including enterprise owned encryption, workforce VPN management, network segmentation, multi-cloud federation, and more. We at Cohesive never presumed to know exactly which web application firewall your organization uses, or which network intrusion detection system you wanted to use, so we started building our VNS3 plugin system back in 2014. Our goal is to provide our clients with the ability to fully customize their network edge for their unique use case on the solid foundation of VNS3. Our clients brought their Nginx WAF configurations, their Suricata rules, and their organizational expertise, and were able to plug it into VNS3, providing a uniform network edge for their enterprise.

VNS3 Plugin Manager Features

As we continue to build the plugin system with our clients, we’ve noticed there are two types of users that utilize it most: technical users who are comfortable creating network functions in containers and less technical users who simply want to install a plugin and perhaps edit said plugin’s configuration file. Here is where the Plugin Manager comes in:

The plugin manager provides a simple UI console for managing your plugin’s configuration. This includes creating your plugin’s firewall policy, directly editing plugin configuration files, viewing logs, and even the ability to run plugin commands. If the plugin provides a UI, you can access it directly from the plugin manager UI.

The plugin manager is the next step forward for VNS3 continuing to provide a fully customizable networking platform for your cloud edge. Now you can seamlessly manage your network edge plugins all in one place, allowing your organization to take full advantage of our combined expertise.

What’s Next for the Plugin Manager

As a little teaser of our product roadmap, the VNS3 Plugin platform will soon allow you to install your plugins directly on VNS3, including third party plugins vetted by Cohesive Networks. This will allow your organization to take advantage of our expertise and the lessons we’ve learned from other clients. Want to set up Datadog monitoring with VNS3? Install the Datadog plugin. Need intrusion detection? Grab the plugin provided by Zeek. Check out our currently available plugins and installation tutorials on our documentation site here.

Our claim: VNS3 will always be the most customizable network edge device for your cloud networking needs. Hold us to it.